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Today was unseasonably warm for November. I didn't actually look at a thermometer, but I'd guess it was in the mid to high 50's (I just checked Weatherbug and they say it was 59, so I was pretty close). It was very nice because we had a lot of outdoor work to do. This morning my Dad arrived to help me butcher 5 of our roosters that had gotten rather large and annoying. We had 12 chicks hatch this summer and 8 of them turned out to be roosters. Now there are three remaining, plus their Daddy, Big Red, and our free-range friend, Big White Chicken. Probably one or two of the others will have to go eventually, because we really don't need 4 roosters in with the hens, but since they are not causing problems now (harrassing hens constantly for example), they can hang around a while longer.

After that chore was done, Dad stuck around to help Ken in the barn, finishing up the second coop, and starting on a pen for the sheep. There's a door in the side of the barn that was boarded up by the previous owners, and we've left it that way, but it would open into what is now the sheep shelter. So we are building a small pen inside (for isolation of sheep if/when necessary) that will be accessed from the shelter, and we'll have a sliding door outside to close it off when not needed. They had to move quite a bit of stuff around to make room to work. I keep saying that eventually we'll get the space organized so that Ken can have a nice work area. After we get this pen done, I think we'll be able to really work on organizing the rest of it.

I raked up a bunch of leaves, fallen pine needles, pine cones, and maple seeds and spread them on one of the muddier areas of the sheep yard. The pines needles really help a lot because they form almost a mat which helps to hold everything else in place, and all the organic material helps to firm up the sticky, clayey mud, and make it less slick. Over the winter this stuff should break down and mix into the soil and improve it. Then at some point in the coming year we'll re-seed it to a pasture mix. The one good thing about too much rain, and all the resulting muck and mud and sheep churning up the ground with their hooves, is that perhaps the Creeping Charlie will be wiped out, or at least severely curtailed. That stuff is nasty, covering every inch of ground it can reach, and out-competing the grass, and the sheep won't/can't eat it.

I did some inside work too, updating our church's directory with hopefully the final updates. Then I just need to get it printed and distributed!

Tonight we went to a local eatery, Casey's Malt Shoppe. The owners, Carl and Karen, have become friends and we really like going there. We were their last customers tonight so they came and sat with us and chatted. They keep horses, as well as running the restaurant, and Carl has another job besides. Busy folks but they really enjoy the restaurant business.

The sheep are in the midst of breeding season now. I think things are going well. Orange calmed down after the first day, and she no longer has head-butting contests with Flint. I'm hopeful that she'll lamb.

Guess that's all the news that's fit to print!

Today I opened the gate between Flint and the ewes. Now is about the time that you would want to start breeding season if you want lambs in the April-May timeframe. Flint's been showing interest for several weeks on and off, but today I noticed Cozette in particular was following Flint up and down the fenceline. She was definitely in heat and things proceeded pretty much as you would expect. :-) If all goes well, Cozette should lamb around April 7. If she didn't catch this time, she should cycle again in about 17 days.

Orange however is not impressed. In fact, she was downright hostile. If Flint came in her direction at all she would turn and face him and put her head down and they had several bouts of head-butting. She even butted him in the backside as he was paying attention to Cozette, as if she thought she needed to guard the other ewes. I think she's coming into heat though, and I hope she breeds this year. She has very nice conformation and fleece and I'd really like to have those genes passed on. They seemed to all have settled down by the afternoon, so hopefully things will sort themselves out.

In other news, it's raining AGAIN. We had about a week and a half or two weeks without significant rain and things had begun drying out a bit. But the ground is still saturated and so any amount of rain just pools and puddles. The sheep yard is turning into a mud pit. I guess now I'm just hoping for it to get cold and freeze. We really could have probably gone without rain until Spring and things would have been fine. At least the sheep have the barn shelter and the hoop house, both of which are dry so they can get out of it when they want to.

I'll be the first to admit that our property is not the ideal land for raising sheep. No nice hillside meadows or gently rolling pastureland. Instead we have fine sandy loam that doesn't drain as well as you might think, and every low spot collects water. And this has been a pretty wet fall. We came home today to find a few small ponds where this morning there were none. The ground is fully saturated and the extra half inch of rain we got today was the straw that broke the camel's back. The drainage Ken put in is working, filling the ditch he dug to the brim and then some. There's plenty of dry-ish areas, and we put their hoop house on a high spot, so that's all fine, but if only it would stop raining!

The pasture (I use that term loosely because it's only somewhat cleared) farthest out isn't fenced yet, and I wish it were because that is the highest point on our property I think, besides the spot where the house sits. We've pretty much decided where the fenceline will run, so now we have to start clearing a path. It's not going to get done this fall but we hope to at least make a start.

Tomorrow is supposed to be partly sunny. I'm going to fill in some low spots with soil from our dirt pile, and hopefully start working on clearing for fence, while Ken and Dad work on getting a second chicken coop done in the barn. Guess it's time for bed...

They're calling it the Columbus Day Storm of 2006. It started yesterday afternoon, and continued all through the night into this morning. Apparently in places like Clarence, NY they have upwards of 20 inches of snow on the ground. Snow was falling at the rate of 3-4 inches/hour. We have nothing here in Ransomville. It just started snowing a little bit ago and it's just starting to stick. It's a lake effect snow band off Lake Erie that has moved north and they said will continue to move north through the morning and eventually end up over Lake Ontario.

We had no idea that this was going on. I knew there was a winter storm warning that was issued for overnight, but somehow it didn't occur to me that something like this might happen to this degree. We don't watch TV much, and never listen to the radio in the morning, so we were blissfully ignorant as we started out for work. And the kicker was that we had to get up early, since I had an 8am meeting to get to. We didn't run into any snow until we were south of Lewiston on the I-190. I dropped Ken off at his work in Niagara Falls, and big fat flakes were coming down fast. The further south I went, the worse it got. When I got onto Grand Island I could see that the snow was heavy and sticky. I was listening to the radio by now, and they were reporting travel bans throughout WNY, along with every school being closed. As I travelled down the road my workplace is on, I could see the trees bending under the weight of the snow. There was a cable of some sort down across the road. And when I saw the parking lot, it was nearly empty. I pulled in and went inside. The plant was dark and only the emergency generators were on. Only a few people were there, and the Customer Service supervisor let everyone know that we were setting the phone message to let customers know we were going to be closed today. One other of my co-workers in tech service managed to get in (she lives in Lewiston) and she called our supervisor who was still at home to let him know that we were closed. We left a message for our colleagues in California and split.

Currently there are 300,000 people in WNY without power. The trees still have most of their leaves, so the snow causes the branches to be so heavy that limbs and entire trees are coming down everywhere and cutting power lines. And the Water Authority has no power to their plant (since middle of the night) so they are restricting water usage throughout Erie County. The Thruway is closed from Dunkirk to near Rochester, which is about a 105 mile stretch.

So it looks like winter in Western NY has come a bit early this year!

The ewes have all been sheared, as of last weekend. Let me tell you, Icelandics are squirrelly critters. They simply refuse to sit still. When we sheared Flint a few weeks back, it was a bit easier because he's still only half-grown, and I could basically overpower him until he wore himself out wiggling and sat there. But the ewes are bigger, and stronger, and only Cozette actually stayed pretty calm while I sheared her belly. We ended up tipping them on their backsides to do their bellies, and then let them stand up and Ken held their heads while I sheared the rest. That seemed to work much better and even Orange was cooperative.

Flint was isolated in the paddock a ways off, and I think he was laughing...

So now all the ewes are naked and cavorting around the pasture making eyes at Flint.

Here's some pics of the ewes and their new hay feeder.